Even sedition has its moral code, and like war itself is subject to obligations which no man can neglect without infamy.

The conspirators condemned by the Special Commission--and among them are to be found the most prominent of the Irish leaders[124]--have been guilty of conduct which no wise man ought to forget and no good man ought to palliate.
They have for years excited Irish ignorance against England and against English officials by a system of gross incessant slander; witness the pages of _United Ireland_ when Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan were in power at Dublin.

The men whom we are told to trust are men who did enter into a criminal conspiracy by a system of coercion and intimidation to promote an agrarian agitation against the payment of agricultural rents, for the purpose of impoverishing and expelling from the country the English landlords[125]; they are men found guilty of not denouncing intimidation which led to crime and outrage, but of persisting in it with a knowledge of its effect.[126] They are proved to have made payments to compensate persons injured in the commission of crime[127]; they are men who have solicited and taken the money of Patrick Ford, the advocate of dynamite; and have invited and obtained the co-operation of the Clan-na-Gael.[128] Their whole system of agitation has been utterly unlike that of honourable agitators, conspirators, or rebels; it would have excited the horror of O'Connell; it would have been repudiated with disgust by Davis, by Gavan Duffy, by Smith O'Brien, and the other Irish leaders of 1848.

The men who now ask for our confidence have in their attack upon England forgotten what was due to Ireland; they have deliberately taught Irish peasants lessons of dishonesty, oppression, and cruelty, which the farmers of Ireland may take years to unlearn.

Of the degradation which they have gradually inflicted upon the English Parliament one is glad to say little.